Abdulaziz Ghuloum wrote:
> You may feel very strongly against using hash-semi style comments in
> production code.
"Strongly" is overstating it. I think it's a bad practice. More
importantly, I think it's a needless feature that clutters up the
language and on the whole is more harmful than useful.
> Others have described some actual real-life situations
> in which they found legitimate uses of expression comments. Are you
> seriously suggesting that they should be denied using a handy and useful
> facility just because *you* consider it bad style in production code?
You bet, *if* I were a Scheme editor, which I'm not. A good fraction
of the harm is having it in the language, even if I don't personally
use it, because it makes the langauge bigger without adding sufficiently
useful functionality, and because it makes it easier to make
hard-to-read mistakes: If I accidentally type a # in the wrong place
it can easily be a hard-to-track-down bug.
> Do style and coding conventions belong to any language
> standard? (I don't think so.)
Absolutely:
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/third_edition/html/names.html#6.8
More generally, one should not design a programming language without
considering pragmatic issues such as layout, readability, and error
proneness. Issues of style (including indentation) need to be part
of the design process even if they're not enforced or part of the
specification proper.
--
--Per Bothner
per_at_bothner.com http://per.bothner.com/
Received on Sat Sep 30 2006 - 13:39:02 UTC